I was very surprised to find oyster mushrooms this week – I didn’t think to look, since we’ve finally had a dry stretch of weather. I was giving a farm tour as we may be the site of a possible farm event later this fall, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen them at all.

This one is a little past prime, but it’s fun to see them start to grow. Martin was making his signature beef stroganoff and lamented that we didn’t have any mushrooms and I was happy to direct him to the mushroom logs

I thought I should chime in on the factory/commodity egg recall. To our customers, the stories from the Iowa egg factories do not come as a surprise – hens in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings, piles of manure 8 feet tall leaning on the doors of the buildings, maggots crawling on the factory floor.

Compare this to smaller-size traditional production (see our eggs above). I know this is the way of the world, and why it only costs these mega-producers 54 cents a dozen to produce a dozen eggs. What gets under my skin is the lack of transparency and hijacking of the images of small farms. You know the package of eggs, with the nice red barn or pastoral scene that evokes a traditional farm image. Like repackaged mortgage securities, there’s no way for the consumer to know the true source, since the eggs are branded under many different labels. So as a consumer, you have no idea who’s behind the eggs – in this case – here’s a litany of documented problems with the owner of the recalled egg factories:

DeCoster Egg Farms agreed to pay $2 million in fines for health and safety violations at a DeCoster farm in Maine. U.S. Labor secretary Robert Reich said conditions were “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop.” Reich’s successor, Alexis Herman, called the state of the farms “simply atrocious.”

The State of Iowa designated DeCoster a “habitual violator” of environmental regulations.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agreed to a $1.5 million settlement against DeCoster Farms on behalf of women who reported they were subjected to sexual harassment, including rape, abuse and retaliation by some supervisory workers at DeCoster’s Wright County plants.

51 workers were arrested during an immigration raid at six DeCoster egg farms. His farms had been the subject of at least three previous raids.

This is part of the price we pay for eggs that cost 54 cents a dozen to produce.

Predictably, the blame for the poisoning lies with the consumers according to industry spokespeople:

“Some people may not think of an egg as you would ground beef, but they need to start,” says Krista Eberle of the United Egg Producers’ Egg Safety Center. “It may sound harsh and I don’t mean it to sound that way. But all the responsibility cannot be placed on the farmer. Somewhere along the line consumers have to be responsible for what they put in their bodies.”

I appreciated the response of another food safety expert to this:

If consumers are being held accountable as the last line of defense in the food safety farm-to-fork line, then the egg industry needs to be explicit about it, says Carol Tucker-Foreman, an assistant secretary of agriculture under President Jimmy Carter who’s worked on food policy at Consumer Federation of America for decades.

“Should egg cartons be required to carry a message that says ‘Warning – to protect your health and the health of those in your household, you should assume that these eggs are contaminated with salmonella enteriditis and must be handled carefully in order to avoid possible illness?’ ” she asks.

At the end of the day, this presents one of the dangers of an industrial food system with hugely centralized operations – one bag egg (pun intended) can lead to the recall of a half-billion eggs. This is not a system that has much resiliency and as former Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under President George Bush said, offers those who want to harm us a quick and easy path to contaminate the food supply – whether it be in a mega meatpacking plant or elsewhere in the system.

Kudos to Fareway Grocery and Trader Joe’s who have committed to not buying eggs from these farms ever again.

Today was a milestone for local foods, Marshalltown Community College, and Linda.

It was the ribbon cutting for the new ag incubator building adjacent to the college and serving the farmers renting some of the land on the adjacent 140 acres of certified organic land. Participating in the ribbon cutting are Linda, Rep Latham, Sue Martin Executive Director of the Martha Ellen Tye Foundation, and Conrad DeJardin, Community College Board of directors.

Our congressman, Tom Latham spoke – he was able to help secure some funding for a portion of the building through the Small Business Administration.

Here’s a shot of the front of the building.

Inside is an office, place for vegetable washing, storage, and coolers. This is just the first part of a vision put forth by Linda seven years ago to help small entrepreneurial farmers, learn, produce, and market foods. Next? An incubator kitchen so producers can legally process foods and test recipes before going to a larger food processing facility.

The late summer project to remove the old garage and reside and reroof the east side of the house is complete, except for some door frame painting, caulking, screen door and window screen installation.

We’ll get around to the rest of the hose at a later date. An added bonus is the new patio where the garage used to be. We still have another garage and shed for the cars, so the patio seems like a good idea!

When the berries come on fast, in addition to freezing, we like to can some whole berries – they are great in the winter in yogurt, cold cereal, and pancakes. they are easy to can as well.

First heat some water and sugar for the liquid to a boil – add sugar to taste. Heat up canning kettle to boiling. Soften up the canning lids by getting water to nearly boiling and putting lids in and then take off the heat.

Put berries directly in jars.

Fill to within a half inch of the top of the jar with the boiling sugar water mix.

Wipe the rim of the jars dry, put on lids, hand tighten rings, and put in boiling water bath for 20 minutes, making sure an inch of water is above the jars. It’s a quick and easy way to put up food for later.

Today there were two deliveries at high hopes. A pair of Birkenstocks for Linda delivered by Fed Ex and the package was left in the mud room attached to the house.

And this box of thin balsa-wood like unassembled berry boxes delivered (in a manner of speaking). For some reason the UPS driver thought that the best place to drop off this package on a rainy day was to leave it alongside the driveway halfway between the road and the house! It might have been better had it been under the spruce tree! Needless to say the thin wood was wet and some were warped and we weren’t enthused about using boxes that were wet and had a chance to mold for food – so, the true story won’t be that UPS screwed up, it will be how they respond to the screw up.